Using the Geoweb to Visualize Literature

When I’m not producing MetaCarta’s technical documentation, I study literature, and I’ve often thought about how our various products might be useful in my study. I’m not the first person to have this idea — a couple of years ago, a colleague put together a site called, ”Gutenkarte”, which mapped a limited number of public domain books. Older books, unfortunately, can be difficult to parse geographically; the names of places have changed in the past hundred or thousand years, and the relative importance of different places with the same name has changed as well. But some more recent books are available under the public domain, and I’ve been able to use MetaCarta’s tools to get interesting maps from them.

I first experimented with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as James Joyce is one of my favorite authors, and the full text of each is available at Finnegans Web. While these novels are recent enough that the place names and relative importance are similar to today’s, there is a different problem with them: The structure of the average sentence is very different from the structure of a news report or scientific paper. In fact, the structure of Finnegans Wake is very different from pretty much everything, so I decided to stick with Ulysses.

I ran the first chapter of Ulysses through the MetaCarta OnDemand GeoTagger. You can experiment with the GeoTagger at the MetaCarta JSON API Explorer. By choosing the getEnhancedLocationReferences option and clicking the PNG link in the upper right-hand corner of the JSON API Explorer, I got an image like this:

Image 1: Unfiltered geographic points of interest in chapter one of Ulysses

This image includes a number of place locations that are definitely references in the text, such as those in Ireland, as well as some locations that are incorrect tags, like “Mulligan, Texas.” (Mulligan is the last name of one of the characters in the novel.) By turning up the “mingeoconfidence” parameter, which controls how confident the MetaCarta system needs to be in its results before displaying them, I was able to create this map that only shows locations that are definitely intended in the text:

Image 2: Filtered geographic points of interest in chapter one of Ulysses

The images available through the PNG GeoTagger service do not have tremendous resolution, but the various individual locations in Ireland could be plotted on a map and then sorted by appearance in the text to produce a map of where the characters travel over the course of the book. Tours that mirror Ulysses are actually quite popular; Dublin celebrates “Bloomsday” every June 16th and thousands of people re-enact the book. Presumably they already have maps, but a map like one of these could help someone seeking to visualize or re-enact a less popular journey.

Ulysses isn’t the only book with such a following; a quick Google search shows that tours based on The Da Vinci Code, for example, are a major market. Allowing users to geotag and then map fictional texts would let anyone build a tour for any book they wanted — or would let scholars like me get a geographic understanding of texts very quickly. For example, I recently read Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom by William and Ellen Craft, and was able to use the MetaCarta PNG GeoTagger to create a map showing a rough outline of the authors’ escape from slavery in the 1840s:

Image 3: Geographic points of interest from, “Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom”

While I could have generated the same (or possibly a better) image with a map and some time spent reading the book, MetaCarta’s software produced this map for me within seconds, and could do so with the full text of any book. This could be combined with something like Google Books or Amazon’s, “Search Inside!” — two archives that contain a significant portion of popular English printed matter, and offer such maps as a fee-based or ad-supported service. I know I’ve read books, both fiction and non-fiction, and wanted to be able to see the place names in the page I was reading on a map. Ideally, I’d be able to read the book and look at the map at the same time. Perhaps this is something that the Amazon Kindle would be capable of? In any event, using the Geoweb to visualize literature is another potent example of how to effectively leverage information that is already on the Web. Want to see some literature visualized on the map? Please add a comment below.